The Best BBQ Foods, Ranked

We've got a bone to pick.

Tim Carman

Tim Carman (@timcarman) is a James Beard Award-winning reporter and columnist at The Washington Post.

We live in a partisan country where the people cling to their beliefs like a mother clutching a newborn—and I’m not even talking about politics. Barbecue was partisan before partisanship was, well, not exactly cool, but a fact of life in the halls of Congress and on the streets of America.

You want to start a fight? Go to North Carolina and tell the locals that Texas pitmasters produce the best barbecue in America. (Yes, I did this once, in my youth. Never again.) Calvin Trillin famously opined in 1974 that Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City was “possibly the single best restaurant in the world”—writers who quote this line often neglect to include the word “possibly,” with all the hesitancy it implies—and it’s been game on in the barbecue world ever since. Possibly before, too.

The thing is, the barbecue landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade or more. The inexorable shift of America’s population, from farm to city, has made the rise of urban barbecue inevitable. You build restaurants where the people are. The pitmasters are no longer apprentices who work under a legend for years before taking charge of the wood smokers. They’re classically trained chefs or second-career folks who have traded in their drumsticks for a pair of tongs (as did Aaron Franklin, the current golden boy of American barbecue at Franklin Barbecue in Austin).

The new pitmasters are hard to categorize as a whole. Some embrace modern gas-powered smokers and the efficiency they bring to the fickle barbecue process. Others embrace the old ways, relying on wood-fired smokers and their own ability to maintain a fire. Some focus on a single regional style. Others take a broader approach to developing a menu, borrowing from traditions all over the country. These pitmasters have both reinforced the borders around American barbecue—and erased them.

Which brings me to the chore at hand: Picking the best and most iconic dishes in American barbecue, an exercise fraught with complications. I wanted to select dishes that have become the rock stars of barbecue, recognizable (if not always accessible) to barbecue lovers across the country. But in singling out these plates, I also realize all are not created equal: A pork shoulder smoked in Eastern North Carolina often comes with generations of tradition behind it. The same dish in Dallas? Not so much.

Then again, some dishes are so localized that I couldn't convince myself to give them a listing of their own, like chopped whole-hog, which I love for its mix of flavors and textures. So instead, I included it as part of the pulled/chopped category. My list, by and large, favors meats over sides, which is natural. While almost anything can be thrown into a smoker these days—fruits, vegetables, cheese, even tofu, for chrissakes—the earliest and most defining barbecue meals involve whole animal muscles, sometimes whole animals.

But whether animal or vegetable, the list below—possibly—has its own partisan slant, the result of my years living in Kansas City and Houston before arriving in our nation's capital, ground zero of partisanship. Without further ado, here are the best barbecue foods, ranked.

10. Beef rib

Image via First We Feast

Mostly seen in Texas, these monster bones have been popping up in smokehouses across the country, from New York to Los Angeles and every town in between. The bones are sometimes called short ribs, which is a misnomer. They’re long, often six inches in length, and come with a crusty block of beef still attached to the bone. Beef ribs are, without question, the most visually arresting protein in the known barbecue universe. When prepared right, they are also meltingly delicious.

9. Baked beans

Image via Yelp/Jessica M.

Side dishes, like barbecue itself, vary from region to region. Texas, for instance, prefers its legumes in pinto bean form, just like the state’s neighbors to the south. But many other parts of the country ladle up baked beans, often prepared with small white Navy beans. Frequently spiked with bacon or fatty bits of brisket, baked beans taste as if they were custom-made for barbecue, at once sweet, tangy, sticky, and smoky.

8. Potato salad

Image via Liz Barclay

As any steakhouse regular will tell you, beef needs potatoes like politicians need cash. In fact, a potato salad perked up with mustard—especially a nasal-clearing whole-grain mustard—pairs well with many different types of barbecue. The side’s hit of vinegar practically serves as a palate cleanser between bites of fatty meat. The side, I think, works far better with smoked meats than its oily counterpart, the French fry, which may provide a crispy element but also adds more fat calories to a meal already bloated with them.

7. Cole slaw

Image via Liz Barclay

With its coarsely chopped green cabbage and freshly grated carrots, cole slaw may be the closest thing to health food at old-school barbecue joints, where pitmasters don’t call themselves “chefs” and don’t offer hummus and a kale Caesar. I mean, no one is going to mistake cole slaw for an ancient grain salad, but the side does add some refreshing qualities to a meal that trades in a rich, plodding meatiness. It provides crunch, of course, but it also offers a cool, uncooked contrast to all the warm, slow smokiness of barbecue. It comes in many varieties, too, from the jalapeno-spiked slaw in Texas to the ketchup-kissed version in Western North Carolina known as Lexington-style red slaw.

6. Sausages

Image via Liz Barclay

Smoke and sausages have been allies ever since humans first learned to preserve meat by stuffing the ground trimmings into casings, then cooking them over smoldering woods. Some smoked links can trace their lineage back to Old World traditions, such as Texas hot guts, the spicy beef sausages that grew out of the state’s German meat markets of the 19th century. Pork sausages owe a debt to Spanish conquistadors who first introduced pigs to America. But whether beef or pork, spicy or mild, the sausage’s connection to smokehouses goes back centuries, long before barbecue became a gourmet endeavor with chefs who make their own designer links.

5. Chicken

Image via Yelp/Kevin W

Arguably the most undervalued plate in barbecue, chicken ranks below the more iconic meats due largely to pitmastsers who over-smoke the breast until it feels as if you’re chewing on an old cotton shirt. But when done well, barbecue chicken mixes succulence and smokiness with a rare treat: bronzed skin that turns crisp when fully rendered. It’s no wonder that Kansas City Barbeque Society-sanctioned competitions require pitmasters to prepare chicken, along with pork butt, pork ribs and brisket.

4. Spare ribs

Image via Yelp/Lauren F.

Not to be confused with baby backs, which are smaller and less meaty, spare ribs are common to almost every barbecue region, although approaches vary widely from locale to locale. In Memphis, you’ll find dry-style ribs in which the pitmaster sprinkles dried herbs and spices on the bones right before serving them. In Kansas City, your ribs may come to the table with a glaze of tangy tomato sauce. In Texas, your bones may have only a salt and pepper rub to season the smoky meat. In the hands of an experienced pitmaster, every one of these ribs can make you forget everything else on your combo plate.

3. Pork (chopped or pulled)

Image via Yelp/Michael U.

Forever aligned with the Carolinas, pulled/chopped pork is now found throughout the United States, even in Texas, where beef reigns supreme. Outside of Eastern North Carolina, where they prefer whole hog barbecue, the dish usually relies on a Boston butt or a whole pork shoulder, cuts that are ideal for low-and-slow smoking. The fat and connective tissue break down with heat and time, and the cut’s exterior turns a beautiful shade of mahogany, thanks to its spice rub. When pulled or chopped—careful to mix in the crusty pieces known as “outside brown”—the pork is succulent and smoky and, perhaps best of all, able to withstand almost any sauce you throw at it. If you ever stumble on the opportunity to try the whole hog version, snap it up immediately.

2. Brisket

Image via Liz Barclay

Chopped or sliced, piled high on a bun or eaten unsauced on a plate, brisket is the mother of all barbecue meats. Part of brisket’s allure is its sheer unruliness, its ability to bring pitmasters to their knees in frustration. A whole brisket is actually two cuts: a lean section called the flat, and a fatty muscle mass called the point, both of which are nearly impossible to cook evenly at the same time. The men and women who produce the finest briskets in the land—take a bow, Aaron Franklin—are truly worthy of the title, pitmaster.

1. Sauce

Image via Yelp/Don H.

I know, I know. No one just orders a bowl of sauce when they walk into a barbecue joint, and many smokehouses, particularly those in the Lone Star State, pride themselves on their ability to turn out meats that don’t need a drop of the stuff. Still. More than meats, even more than rubs and hardwoods, sauce is often what defines a region’s style. Eastern North Carolina has its spicy vinegar sauce. Western North Carolina has its tomato-vinegar dip. South Carolina has its mustard sauce. Alabama has its mayo-based white sauce. Kansas City has its tangy, tomato-based sauce. Western Kentucky has its Worcestershire-based black sauce to pair with smoky mutton. Like it or not, sauce is often what gives regional barbecue its character.

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